HostGator

Last updated on May 7th, 2018 by Shahzad Saeed

HostGator is one of the most popular hosting companies on the web. It particularly rocks the shared hosting space with affordable starter plans and quick easy setup. HostGator hosts millions of domain names from all over the world, making them one of the largest shared hosting service provider in the world.

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Hostgator was founded in 2002 by Brent Oxley, a student at Florida Atlantic University, which now hosts over 8 million websites turning into one of the most popular web hosting providers in the industry.

With every HostGator plan, you get a vast array of tools that help you quickly get your website up and running. Whether you want site builder tools or one-click application installer, SEO tools or backup solutions, you get everything at your fingertips. It also comes with a 45 day money back guarantee, so you can sign up for a hosting account risk free.

HostGator’s award winning support team is available every day throughout the year whenever you need it by telephone, live chat or email. The documentation is extensive that helps you walk you through every aspect of website hosting with ease.

Hostgator always strive for excellence by upgrading their infrastructure as well as user experience. Whether you want to build a hobby site or a company website with off-the-charts growth, you’ll find their backend user interface extremely easy to use. As your business grows, you can easily upgrade to their VPS and dedicated server options.

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HostGator offers cheap hosting, also known as shared hosting, which is the best choice for users who are just starting out and are expecting a low traffic volume for their site. With cheap hosting, many websites will share a single hosting server.

HostGator also offers cloud hosting for a website that requires faster page rendering even during frequent traffic surges. While cloud hosting utilizes multiple server resources for your website, shared hosting is limited to a single server.

With every cheap host plan, you get tons of different website scripts that let you easily kick start a website, including WordPress, Joomla and Drupal with one-click installers.

Unlike most other hosting providers, all the HostGator plans allow you to set up unlimited email addresses from your account with your domain name with unmetered storage. Plus, you can try their hosting service risk-free for 45 days.

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HostGator’s dedicated hosting is the ideal solution for extremely high traffic blogs and websites. With a dedicated server, you have the full system resources directly at your disposal.

You also get data center level DDOS protection and an IP-based firewall, which ensures the security of your website and also gives you a peace of mind. With dedicated hosting, you get a minimum of 4 cores per server, 1TB of RAID storage, and between four and 30 gigs of available RAM.

If you want to save big, you can subscribe to a plan with their legacy server for as low as $79 / mo. While both generations of dedicated servers are powerful and flexible, the new servers allow multiple Linux distributions.

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HostGator’s VPS server gives you more flexibility and performance around your website. With entry level VPS nodes, you get more flexibility without a significant performance improvement from your cheap hosting. Whereas the higher end VPS gives you both flexibility and performance improvement.

HostGator strives for excellence and regularly improve their VPS server hardware infrastructure by working with industry leaders like Intel and AMD to constantly evaluate the platform for maintaining optimal performance.

With every plan, you also get weekly off-site backup of your data, so in case something goes wrong, you can easily revert it back without hassle.

All plans include 2 IP addresses with a disk space ranging from 120 GB to 240 GB.

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Having been a recommended WordPress partners for years, HostGator now also offers managed WordPress hosting for those who want to build a highly efficient WordPress website. With WordPress hosting, you get additional protection out of the box to prevent WordPress-specific vulnerabilities and attacks.

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HostGator’s reseller hosting allows you to make some extra income by hosting your clients’ website. With a reseller hosting plan, you get all the set of powerful tools you need to succeed ranging from WHM to billing software.

Not only can you allocate resources to best fit your clients’ need, you can even offer additional services to your clients, like SSL certificates, domains, etc.

All HostGator’s reseller hosting plans come with unlimited domains, SQL databases, email accounts and FTP accounts. For your privacy, you can set private nameservers based on your domain name.

The WHM control panel lets you monitor server status and set brandable client panel with your company logo for white labeling your service.

Features

(5.0 / 5.0)

Reliable hosting: Founded in 2002, HostGator now hosts about 8 million websites and promises an uptime guarantee of 99.99%. Moreover, you get one month credit on your account if you experience downtime that falls short of their uptime guarantee.

Generous money back guarantee: Unlike most other web hosting companies, HostGator allows you try their service risk-free for 45 days and if you’re not fully satisfied with their service, you’ll get your money back.

Free migration: HostGator’s expert migration team helps you transfer your existing website from anywhere to your HostGator account. You can also transfer domain registrations as well. This way you can manage your entire online portfolio under a single hub. All new accounts are eligible for HostGator’s free transfers within 30 days of signing up.

Unlimited email accounts: Unlike most other hosting providers, all web hosting plans allow you to set up unlimited email accounts with unmetered disk space.

Their extensive support portal boasts over 500 video tutorials and about 700 step by step articles that help you explore different aspects of web hosting.

Flexible billing periods: When signing up with HostGator, you can choose to pay for one month to 36 months, with discounts for longer periods.

Performance

(4.0 / 5.0)

Performance is one of the biggest factors you need to consider when choosing a web host.

Without a doubt, your visitors expect your site to load quickly – and they’ll abandon your site if it takes about three seconds to load according to a study.

To test the performance of HostGator, we created a test site with WordPress, using the default Twenty Seventeen theme and dummy content for theme development, including images.

According to Pingdom’s website speed test, our test site loads less than a second for a server in Dallas, Texas. That’s faster than 94% of all tested sites.

Apart from Pingdom, we also used a testing tool called Load Impact to figure out how HostGator handles visitors during a traffic surge. Load Impact sent some virtual users (VUs) to our site and gradually built up to 100 visitors at a time to test how the server handles it.

For a detailed look, take a look at the charts below.

In the chart, you can find a blue line (VUs active) which shows the number of virtual users sent to our HostGator site and a green line (VU load time) which represents how much time it would take to load a web page for a user.

Evidently, our site was quick until there were about 80 visitors at a time. As traffic grows, the site started to slow down.

Considering the shared hosting environment, these results are pretty good. With shared hosting, you’ll be sharing your server resources with other sites. If you often get that much visitors at a time, you’ll likely need to upgrade your hosting to VPS for smoother performance.

That being said, the site never went down during our speed test. Take a look at the record of our uptime and response time of our site in the screenshot below.

HostGator Server Response Time

It goes without saying the content published on your website will have an impact on the performance of your site. For instance, a site containing too many images will likely take more time to load compared to a site with no image.

To get accurate results, we’ll need to ignore the content of our page entirely and test the response time.

For this purpose, we’ll have to use a speed testing tool known as Bitcatcha, which works differently by completely ignoring the content and records the loading time from eight different global locations: New York, LA, London, Brazil, India, Singapore, Japan and Australia. The speed for each location is measured three separate times, and then the results are averaged. To get a better picture of the web host’s speed around the world, the speed from each location is measured three separate times, and then the results are averaged.

From the report, you can find that our HostGator site was rated C by Bitcatcha. In the United States, the web hosting server responded very quickly, in just a few milliseconds.

For all locations around the world, HostGator still responded in less than a second. It came as no surprise since HostGator servers’ are located in the United States. It also means your site will load quickly for your website visitors around the world and even faster for US visitors.

Support

(5.0 / 5.0)

Over 2 million customers have already trusted HostGator, so it goes without saying, HostGator is one of the most reliable web hosting companies in the world.

HostGator’s award winning customer support team is available every day throughout the year whenever you need it via telephone, live chat or email. The documentation is extensive that helps you walk you through every aspect of website hosting with ease.

Upon subscription to any of their hosting plan, you’ll get access to HostGator’s dedicated support portal from which you can manage all of your support tickets.

Their extensive support portal comprises answers to your pertinent questions regarding web hosting. You can easily find a solution by using the prominent search that’s being kept prominent in the portal. Their robust help center includes 680+ help articles and 500+ video tutorials, which helps you explore every aspect of web hosting, step by step.

The best thing is that support is guaranteed by the CEO, Adam Farrar himself. If you find an issue with the regular support, you can ask your ticket to be assigned to Adam, so he can respond directly.

Ease of Use

(5.0 / 5.0)

All HostGator hosting account comes with an easy to use cPanel by which you can manage all your website, emails, billing and support portal.

You’ll find tons of different website scripts that help you easily kick start a new website with one-click installer for WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.

HostGator also comes with a complete drag and drop builder known as HostGator website builder, which is shipped with 100+ mobile-friendly templates. It also offers seamless integration with PayPal, making it easier for your customers to purchase your product or services right from your site.

Pricing

(5.0 / 5.0)

No matter which HostGator’s hosting plans you’re choosing, you’ll get unmetered storage and bandwidth along with unlimited number of email addresses you can set up for your domain.

FAQs

Having helped thousands of users choose a web hosting plan and start their website, we have answered just about every question you can think of. Here are some of the most frequently asked questions about HostGator.

Which HostGator plan should I get?

Use shared hosting if you’re just starting out and are not expecting extremely high traffic volume. As you grow, you can upgrade your hosting to VPS (Virtual Private Server), which gives you more flexibility and high performance.

Dedicated server is for hosting a website with high traffic volume. It doesn’t share server resources with any other websites, except yours.

Where are HostGator servers located?

HostGator servers are located in Provo, Utah and Houston, Texas.

Can HostGator handle high traffic?

Yes. It depends on your hosting plan. If your site starts consuming too much resources, then HostGator will ask you to upgrade to a higher plan.

What’s unmetered bandwidth and disk space?

This means you’re NOT charged based on the amount of bandwidth or disk space you use. However, keep in mind that with a shared hosting account, according to HostGator’s Terms of Service, you can utilize disk space and bandwidth in the normal operation of a small business website.

Hosting accounts that use 25% or more of system resources for longer than 90 seconds would be in violation of HostGator’s Terms of Service.

What happens if you exceed usage?

Once you exceed usage, you’ll receive an email notification asking you to reduce the usage. If you continue to exceed usage, you’ll probably need to upgrade to a higher server.

Does HostGator offer free website migration?

If you have an existing website that you want to transfer to HostGator, the good news is they offer FREE site transfers for new accounts within 30 days of subscription.

Can I upgrade my HostGator plan later?

We always recommend users to start with the smaller plans and upgrade as needed. HostGator makes it very easy for you to upgrade.

Does HostGator offer a month-to-month payment option?

Yes, HostGator offers month-to-month payment option for all of their hosting plans. Although it’s important to note that they offer significant discounts for longer-term deals.

Can I create subdomains in HostGator?

Yes, you can easily create subdomains in HostGator using the cPanel.

Do I need to purchase the addons that HostGator offers me?

No, you do not need to purchase any addons while purchasing a hosting plan. Should you decide that you need them later, you can always add them to your account.

How can I start an online store with HostGator?

HostGator supports a lot of different online store tools, including Magento. With a single click, you can install Magento on your hosting server.

If you want to create an online store with a WordPress powered solution like WooCommerce, you’ll first need to install WordPress on your host and then WooCommerce on top of it. Unlike some other hosting providers, HostGator doesn’t offer a WooCommerce hosting plan.

HostGator vs Other Hosts

Wondering how HostGator stacks up against other web hosting companies?
See our side-by-side comparison to see for yourself.

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Final Recap

HostGator allows you to select from a wide variety of hosting plans that best suit your needs. You can find dozens of one-click installers to kick start your website. Every plan also comes with a built-in free website builder with 100+ free mobile friendly templates to choose from.

Over 2 million customers have already trusted HostGator, which proves that HostGator is one of the most reliable web hosting providers. Whether you are a seasoned Internet pro, or just kick starting your online career with your first website, you’ll find all the set of tools to run an awesome website without hassle.

If you’re looking for an affordable and reliable web host, HostGator is the best bet for you.

You would be a fool to use hostgator, their customer support is terrible and your website if even meaningfully successful will hit some imaginary threshold on their part and they will freeze your site for a few days without any replies. They do pay a lot for referrals however.

I have used Hostgator services, these were OK. I shifted to Hostinger and I believe it was right decision to take. If you want good quality and cheap hosting services, I suggest one should go for Hostinger. They guarantee 99.99% uptime and have dedicated 24/7 customer support.
It has simple and user-friendly cpanel without any complexity.

I purchased Hostgator’s shared hosting service and was happy with the service throughout my first year. However, upon logging in to my account at renewal time, I noticed had they had signed me up for MANY optional services but had not emailed me a monthly invoice for any of them. They deducted the funds from my credit card, but never once sent an invoice. At the end of the day the fee for the service was 3x what they said it would be when i signed up. In addition, at the end of the first year the price goes up significantly (it works the same for most hosts), and they charge extra for everything. Want domain privacy, that will be $25. Want Sitelock ($35), Backup ($25). It goes on and on.

I am hosting my website and two others on hostgator from last one year. In starting my wordpress email not going to customers. but soon they start.Also there support takes much time to help otherwise it is good overall

I have been using Host Gator for about 5 years now and have never had a problem.
Using Host Gator is one thing I never have to think about. Owning a small business your time is pulled in many directions and time is money. I love having Host Gator because it just works as expected and rarely needs me to do a thing.

I have had Hostgator as my only hosting for about 7 years now. I love it because it is easy to set up and use for a newbie. I have set up databases, chron jobs, and multiple email accounts using only the instruction on their website. I couldnt do that at GoDaddy, it was too confusing. I’m soo glad I switched!
If my website was ever down, it must have been very short, because I have never noticed it being down. Not even once.

I began using Hostgator a few years ago while I was taking coding classes and haven’t really had too many issues with it. The only think i would like to convey is that pricing could come down and be relative to the site. My site is not used for ecommerce or anything else really and the plan I have is more than I need. However when I attempted to down-grade the plan I was told I would have to “pay” to move the site??? That to me seemed rather harsh and it kind of put me off -I certainly will not and have not referred anyone to Hostgator because of it. On the up side, as far as I know I haven’t had the site go down which I think is a plus.

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